Book Image

Mastering OAuth 2.0

Book Image

Mastering OAuth 2.0

Overview of this book

OAuth 2.0 is a powerful authentication and authorization framework that has been adopted as a standard in the technical community. Proper use of this protocol will enable your application to interact with the world's most popular service providers, allowing you to leverage their world-class technologies in your own application. Want to log your user in to your application with their Facebook account? Want to display an interactive Google Map in your application? How about posting an update to your user's LinkedIn feed? This is all achievable through the power of OAuth. With a focus on practicality and security, this book takes a detailed and hands-on approach to explaining the protocol, highlighting important pieces of information along the way. At the beginning, you will learn what OAuth is, how it works at a high level, and the steps involved in creating an application. After obtaining an overview of OAuth, you will move on to the second part of the book where you will learn the need for and importance of registering your application and types of supported workflows. You will discover more about the access token, how you can use it with your application, and how to refresh it after expiration. By the end of the book, you will know how to make your application architecture robust. You will explore the security considerations and effective methods to debug your applications using appropriate tools. You will also have a look at special considerations to integrate with OAuth service providers via native mobile applications. In addition, you will also come across support resources for OAuth and credentials grant.
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
Mastering OAuth 2.0
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
11
Tooling and Troubleshooting
Index

Common attacks


Now that we've looked at some security best practices to keep your application secure, let's now take a look at some common attacks against OAuth 2.0 clients that you should be aware of. We will also examine the mitigation techniques you can use to protect your application from such attacks.

Cross-site request forgery (CSRF)

Cross-site request forgery is a powerful attack that has been gaining popularity with attackers in recent years. It involves tricking users into following a malicious link that performs an undesirable action on a trusted site without their knowledge, making use of their pre-existing sessions with that site.

For instance, imagine a user has just logged into their bank in their favorite web browser. Now, in another tab, they open an e-mail from a malicious user with a link that says "See cats here!" which leads to http://www.catloversheaven.com/.

This site is owned by the attacker and, while the user is browsing cute cat pictures, in the background, the website...